Examples

The prepuce is the starting-point of many of the cases of penitis and retention of urine that often accompany attacks of gonorroea; especially can this result be anticipated where the prepuce is long, pendulous, and with its veins in a varicose condition.

M. Demarquay has collected the history of twenty-five cases; from him we learn that the prepuce is the most frequent seat of the start of the affection, from whence, according to Astruc, it rapidly spreads to the skin of the whole organ, and then attacks the corpora cavernosa; it may even extend as high as the umbilicus.

This will, we are told, lessen his chances of becoming a victim to the many ills that lie in wait for him, all on account of the glory, honor, and comfort of wearing a prepuce, which is a perfectly physiological appendage.

It would seem really as if a prepuce was a dangerous appendage at any time, and life-insurance companies should class the wearer of a prepuce under the head of hazardous risks, for a circumcised laborer in a powder-mill or a circumcised brakeman or locomotive engineer runs actually less risk than an uncircumcised tailor or watchmaker.

Even where phimosis does not exist, but only the long, lax, and retractable prepuce, that is considered a perfectly physiological condition, the prepuce is liable to cause very distressing and complicating annoyances during the progress of other diseases.

In view of the great frequency of the occurrence of cancer of the penis, and the facts pointed out by Roux, that, after the removal of the cancerous prepuce or a portion of the penis for cancer, in case of a recurrence the disease does not do so in the penis, but that it attacks the inguinal glands, showing conclusively that the prepuce is the inciting cause as well as the initial point of attack, the sentiments in the foregoing paragraph, taken from the words of Hutchinson, are worthy of our most careful consideration.

To be generous, and not libel nature, we must conclude that the prepuce is a near relative to the fast-disappearing climbing-muscle; very useful in our primitive, arboreal days, when we needed such a muscle to reach our perch for the night, and a prepuce or something of the kind, in default of a breech-cloth, to protect the glans penis from being scratched by the briars or thorny and rough bark of the trees in our ascent.